Josef Blösche

Josef Blösche
Born	(1912-02-12)12 February 1912 Friedland, Bohemia, Austria–Hungary
Died	Leipzig, East Germany
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Years of service	1938–1945
Rank	Rottenführer
Unit	Sicherheitsdienst
Battles/wars	World War II
Awards	War Merit Cross with Swords

Josef Blösche (12 February 1912 – 29 July 1969) was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) in Germany, and served in the SS and SD during World War II as a Rottenführer (Section Leader). Blösche became known to the world as a symbol of the Nazi cruelty inflicted on people within the Warsaw ghetto because of a famous photograph taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which portrays a surrendering little boy in the foreground, and Blösche as the SS soldier who is facing the boy with an MP18 sub-machine gun in hand.

World War II

Blösche spent his early life working as a farmhand and a waiter at his father's hotel. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1938, after Adolf Hitler's Germany annexed the Sudetenland. After serving in Warsaw with the SS from March 1940 onwards, he joined the Security Service Sicherheitsdienst (SD) division of the SS. He served in the SD's Warsaw ghetto outpost in mid-1942, when the mass deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp began. Blösche received the German War Merit Cross for his actions during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In May 1945, he surrendered to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union. Blösche was sent to the Soviet camps for forced labour shortly thereafter. In early 1946, still a prisoner of war, he was returned to East Germany. In August 1946 he suffered a major accident at work, leaving the side of his face severely deformed. In 1947 his labour camp was dissolved, and Blösche was released. He returned to where his parents lived and spent time in the quiet. His facial scars protected him from discovery as the SS soldiers were pictured in the photos of the Warsaw ghetto. He began living a normal life, was married, and had two children.

Josef Blösche at right, with SS and Police Leader Jürgen Stroop at center watching housing blocks burn during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Picture taken at Nowolipie street looking East, near intersection with Smocza street. On the left burning balcony of the townhouse Nowolipie 66

The famous photo, Blösche with gun at right

Photo from Nowolipie Street. In the back one can see (from the left) townhouses at Nowolipie 32 (fragment), 30 and 28. Second from right is Josef Blösche. Similar picture, Stroop report original caption: "Jewish Rabbis".

War crimes trial

In 1961, a former SS comrade who was on trial for war crimes in Hamburg, linked Blösche to the atrocities he had committed in Warsaw. Further investigation by the East German police led to a series of findings resulting in his identification and arrest in January 1967.

Blösche was put on trial in Erfurt in April 1969. He was found guilty of having been involved in the deportation of 300,000 Jews, and of murdering an indeterminable number of persons (possibly as many as 2000) including newborn infants, pregnant women, handicapped persons, and the elderly. The Jews gave him the nickname "Frankenstein" for raping and then killing women in the Ghetto. He was sentenced to death, and executed in Leipzig on 29 July 1969, by a shot through the neck. His corpse was then buried in an unmarked grave.

References

• German TV Documentary (2003) and accompanying book "Der SS-Mann Josef Blösche - Leben und Sterben eines Mörders" (The SS figure Josef Blösche - A Murderer's Life and Death) by Heribert Schwan.
• Richard Raskin. A Child at Gunpoint. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus University Press, 2004. ISBN 87-7934-099-7